6 ms·
Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
- bamboozled 2mo agoIt’s wild that people are this dumb. I’m sure if you told an indigenous tribe you were planning to do this they’d agree that it’s stupid, yet here we are.
- bcjdjsndon 2mo agoSend them some subsidies from those large American coffers then, and they won't need to
- paimapi 2mo agoblunt comment but not technically wrong - it's likely poverty and subsistence living that's driving adoption of this 'technique' and much of that originates from a combination of the colonial carve up of Indonesia [0] in combination with the weak and easily exploited position of the country within globalized economic markets [1] [0] https://law.wm.edu/academics/intellectuallife/researchcenters/postconflictjustice/internships/internship-blogs/2022/whitsett-gray/iv.-colonial-scars.php https://law.wm.edu/academics/intellectuallife/researchcenter... >Centuries of Dutch control produced an ethnic and economic caste system familiar to many colonized peoples. Compared to some imperial powers, Dutch policy was less focused on “Dutchifying” the indigenous population, with most attention paid to resource extraction and maritime strategic advantage. [1] https://archive.org/details/ahmad-nashih-luthfi-muhammad-fauzi-agrarian-chronicles-in-indonesia-2018-c/page/18/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/ahmad-nashih-luthfi-muhammad-fau... >The short cut to development that the New Order took was highly depending on foreign loans. Consequently, development models were very much shaped by the foreign institutions that became the source of finance for Indonesia. At the end of the 1980s for instance, the World Bank forced for the project for the construction of Kedung Ombo Dam [...] The construction of the Dam had caused thousands of people and tens of villages to be evicted and involuntarily resettled. The Dam became the symbol of prestige for the New Order. When the New Order regime collapsed, the dam was abandoned and gradually left to dry.
- Poacher5 2mo agoThat's addressed in the article? The claim made is that this is more a way of middle-income market-trading fishermen increasing their catch and profit. Those at the bottom can't afford the necessary explosives.
- mushi_shi 2mo agoYeah, why go through all of the effort to blame this on colonialism? Maybe these people just suck and don't care/don't know any better. We can't make everything a problem of colonialism.
- zmgsabst 2mo agoThey feel superior to those “lesser” humans, when denying them equal intelligence, agency, and morality. They’re just getting off on being racist to the “savages who don’t know better”.
- paimapi 2mo agothat's an uncited claim framed as a guess, not confirmation or even a more educated guess by people performing actual ethnographies and larger demographic analysis. pair it against both the fact that these bombs are easy to make (plastic bottle + explosive) and the stronger kinship ties of families and villages, it's not impossible to imagine groups pooling money to purchase fertilizer on the gray market you'd have to imagine that higher earners would easily be able to navigate out to deeper waters with better boats whereas lower income would stay in shallower waters which is noted as largely where this is happening
- joshuaissac 2mo ago> it's likely poverty and subsistence living that's driving adoption of this 'technique' From the article: > While understudied, the incentives for the use of dangerous dynamite fishing are often falsely attributed solely to poverty and desperation. > The cost barrier to buying boats, bombs, and detonators means it’s more likely a practice for middle-income fishers, according to experts.
- epolanski 2mo ago[flagged]
- voakbasda 2mo ago[flagged]
- karim79 2mo agoLet's not forget the scorpions. They also deserve a turn.
- timcobb 2mo agoThe scorpions and cockroaches will have to fight it out. Life will go on.
- 21asdffdsa12 2mo agoThey would do the exact same as humanity given the tech. Natural organism doing natural things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henderson_Island_(Pitcairn_Islands)#Biological_risk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henderson_Island_(Pitcairn_Isl...
- zmgsabst 2mo agoScorpions had a turn when the giant ones preyed on our lungfish ancestors. This is our turn; eg, similarly dinosaurs preying on proto-mammals and our abuses of avians.
- KellyCriterion 2mo agoFor context, if one missed it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Love,_Not_Warcraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Love,_Not_Warcraft
- 21asdffdsa12 2mo agoAhistoric defeatism. Embraces our nature, instead of fleeing for the hills of utopism. Learn to steer it, change it. We accomplished wonders- humanity is calm and peaceful compared to what it once was. The gaming industry and cellphones alone have pacified a species whose footprint is ever shrinking. Literal monks with hypnotic glowing stones, this whole industry is a miracle and has given nature a breather it would not have had without it.
- pingou 2mo ago"With a bomb dropped once every 62 minutes, the equivalent of three football fields of reef are destroyed each year, according to Williams." That doesn't sound right.
- deadbunny 2mo agoI'd assume the deployment isn't always over reefs?
- cannonpr 2mo agoYou’d be surprised how vulnerable aquatic organisms are, and how far energy travels in water after an explosion…
- chinathrow 2mo agoI would assume the area was larger than reported. I mean that's 24*365 bombs per year.
- franciscop 2mo agoI think the point is the opposite, I also expected a lot more damage from a bomb every hour
- AlwaysRock 2mo agoI'd suspect that the goal isn't to destroy coral reefs and the damage is "accidental." And/or the reefs are already largely fucked, so additional damage is "minimal."
- throwaway2037 2mo agoTo be clear, coral reefs are essentially collectors/attractors/homes for a huge number of fish species. If you go away from a coral reef (even 50 meters), there is large drop-off in the amount of fish in the water column -- almost none. They are absolutely bomb fishing within coral reefs because there are lots of fish.
- wlaw15 2mo agoSometimes you learn of an unintended consequence of seemingly good idea wreaking havoc on an ecosystem. I would not put fishing with "plastic bottles filled with explosives" into that category.
- cute_boi 2mo ago[flagged]
- kubb 2mo agoCast a net or eat tempeh. It being convenient doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do it.
- throwaway2037 2mo agoWhy is this downvoted? It is a reasonable comment.
- Johnny_Bonk 2mo agoCasting a net is actually one of the less sustainable ways to fish.
- tclancy 2mo agoThink you might be casting too wide a net there. It certainly can be.
- throwaway2037 2mo agoI am starting to see this lazy response pattern on HN. Someone makes a reasonable comment, then a responder pops-up like a whack-a-mole to say little more than: "That's not true." or "That's still bad." ... while offering no evidence to their claim, nor any reasonable alternative. I think that it adds so little to the conversation. And specific to the comment, they even used the Holy Grail of annoying Internet argument tendencies: "actually".
- heyitsmedotjayb 2mo agoI bet many of the people here moaning and whinging eat fish themselves!
- kubb 2mo agoI bet almost nobody here eats bombfished fish. <0.1%
- heyitsmedotjayb 2mo agoNo fishers, no food.
- spindump8930 2mo ago> While fishers predominantly use the method to catch fish for sale at local markets — identifiable by their ruptured internal organs and burst swim bladders The article agrees, assuming "here" is global north tech workers.
- micromacrofoot 2mo agoWhat's the point of this post? if you're trying to shame people into vegetarianism it's not going to work, and I'm one myself. There's basically one solution to bomb fishing: make it economically nonviable. You could ban it an punish the people doing it, which is often the immediate action taken and seems like the path being set up here... but really any money spent on enforcement may be better spent on setting the bomb fishers up with the tools to make a living doing something else — ironically "teach a man to fish"
- boringg 2mo agoFile this under the category "people are f-bomb-ing idiots". I wouldn't be surprised if social media was spreading this technique as successful way to fish.
- dmkolobov 2mo agoMy first encounter with the concept of bomb fishing was the Shapoklyak episode of the soviet cartoon Cheburashka, produced in the 70s. It's been around.
- mc32 2mo agoYeah it’s been around for a while but it’s been at the individual level not at the commercial scale which makes the practice way worse.
- dghlsakjg 2mo agoIt’s been commercial in SE Asia for decades. Personally seen it in Thailand and Indo 20+ years ago.
- alwa 2mo agoMine came much later, in the Triplets of Belleville (2003). In case it brings a nostalgic smile to anyone else’s face, too: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N0VrHQ-cHUA& https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N0VrHQ-cHUA&
- DarmokTanagra 2mo agoI've been in the water when people were bomb fishing, its terrifying. There was a diving incident maybe 10 years ago where a group of Chinese divers were killed by bomb fishermen in Indonesia. There are videos of Jacques Cousteau using dynamite to clear reefs of fish.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- red-iron-pine 2mo ago
- pranav_tech26 2mo ago[flagged]
- shellfishgene 2mo agoYeah, usually everyone in the local communities knows who is dynamite fishing. Doesn't mean they will rat out their neighbor, but education on how it hurts everyone is probably more effective in the long term.
- pranav_tech26 2mo ago[flagged]
- wraptile 2mo agoI'm a scuba diver here in Thailand and you can still see blast fishing damage from decades ago that never fully recovered. It's truly as terrible as the article makes it out to be. What is interesting is that both Indonesia and Thailand have strong and similar anti blast fishing laws since early 00s that charge 5+ years of prison time. However, Thailand has been much more successful with taming blast fishing which is practically gone now and the story here is very insightful. Some of it is due to Thailand's geography and high demand for marine tourism but the biggest push here was EU and US regulation that gave Thailand opportunity to shape up. In 2015 (same year when Thai anti blast laws were codified more strictly) US TIP (trafficking in persons) report down-graded Thailand to tier 3 mostly due to fishing slave workers while at the same time EU's IUU (illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing) issued a yellow card. All of which lead to the biggest fishery reform in Thai history which mostly eliminated blast fishing. Since then Thailand is back to tier 2 of TIP and got lost the yellow card from EU's IUU. Indonesia never got tier 3 of TIP despite many arguing it should have and never got a card from IUU. Stories like this turn me into a globalization believer - I know it's not perfect but the system is kinda working?
- throwaway2037 2mo agoThanks for sharing your first-hand account of diving in Thailand. I think they should aggressively pursue coral planting. They are several projects in Indonesia that have demonstrated excellent results. I volunteered for a day doing coral planting in Bali, Indonesia. As part of the dive, they take you to different parts of the coral reef as it recovers, showing you how it changes year after year. You can see the change with your own eyes.
- wraptile 2mo agoI agree though we had very mid results here in the Gulf of Thailand while the Andaman Sea side has had more luck. The issue with Gulf of Thailand is that it's just so shallow with avg depth of only 50m and too calm making new coral growth very hard with existing techniques. There's some new promising research on alternative methods of raising coral larva in labs, but I'm not up to speed with that yet and it seems quite complex.
- willmeyers 2mo agoThis is the repo if people are interesting in this work: https://github.com/ben-williams-ai/Bomb-Fishing https://github.com/ben-williams-ai/Bomb-Fishing
- KellyCriterion 2mo agoFor context, a worth-a-read Wikipedia entry regarding the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_fishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_fishing
- pajko 2mo agoHad experienced grenade fishing in person on the Vjosa in Albania. Was kayaking when a 20-30(-40?) meters high water column appeared about 300 meters in front of me, accompanied by a big bang. Not cool.
- pajko 2mo agoSame place, ~200 meters away from my tent: https://i.postimg.cc/5NN9w92m/IMG-20220802-173453-MP.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/5NN9w92m/IMG-20220802-173453-MP.jpg
- mbmbn 2mo ago[dead]
- ungreased0675 2mo agoIt’s hard to believe this is real. Destroying a vibrant ecosystem for a one-time catch is so selfish and shortsighted it’s amazing to me that anyone would seriously consider doing it.
- kridsdale1 2mo agoPeople will do literally anything if they are hungry enough.
- thinkingtoilet 2mo agoTrue. However, often times the people benefiting from this are plenty fed.
- moomoo11 2mo agoare there other sources of food available?
- WarmWash 2mo agoIt's more like "People will do anything for money"
- shevy-java 2mo agoYou mean, everyone else is fishing nicely? Are you sure about that?
- reticulates 2mo ago
- tobyjsullivan 2mo agoI wonder if there’s a version of Maslow’s hierarchy that applies to countries/societies.
- oasisbob 2mo agoKohlberg's theory of moral development comes to mind.
- shevy-java 2mo agoWell - bombs sounds fancy. How about those huge trawlers that drag everything out? Does not sound as dangerous as bomb fishing. But destroys more than bomb fishing objectively.
- gpi 2mo agoRicidulous fishing in real life
- adjejmxbdjdn 2mo agoWe need to stop our obsession with exploiting animals. It’s leading us to do insane things damaging our own health and the environment, nevermind how much suffering it’s causing the actual sentient beings we’re using.
- tomasphan 2mo agoThis is not an obsession with hurting animals. It’s survival and earning a living for these Indonesian fishermen. To incentivize them to stop you have to give them better options. In this case, teach a man to not fish with explosives and you’ll feed him for the rest of his life.
- xp84 2mo ago> It’s survival and earning a living for these Indonesian fishermen. Why make excuses for greedy jackasses? Their ancestors didn't invent this 5,000 years ago and it's the "oNlY wAy they can survive." They fished without bombs once. Some guy realized this depraved method works, so now lazy people choose to do it so they can get money faster than the people fishing legitimately can. That's why it's illegal.
- tomasphan 2mo agoWe’re just speculating on the economics here so let’s agree to say making it illegal is not fixing the problem.
- DarmokTanagra 2mo agoThese people make a few dollars a week, stop pretending you know anything about their problems and what its like to watch your children go hungry.
- peepee1982 2mo ago5000 years ago was pre-capitalist and if they had struggled getting food on the table and had explosives, they might very well have done the same. In a world where all wealth accumulates at the top and leaves the bottom in precarious conditions, perversions like these are inevitable and could be resolved by treating human needs as priorities and make sure everyone has their needs met, which with todays productivity we could easily accomplish if we all worked together instead of against each other.
- asdf333 2mo agoyeah maybe lets not do bomb fishing
- koliber 2mo agoBomb fishing is bad. I am surprised that only 3 football field equivalent areas are destroyed per year in a country as vast as Indonesia. I hate the idea but this article makes me optimistic that other proactive measures that are not mentioned might be restoring a lot more than this. Read critically.
- doodlebugging 2mo agoI read the article looking for any mention of how they classified the recorded events as bomb blasts versus impulses from seismic surveying for oil and gas. That region has been very active since at least 2015 with seismic surveys and in 2023, the period covered by the article there were several crews operating. I know that seismic survey acquisition should be easily identifiable because those shots occur at precise intervals during the survey and continue all day long with no breaks unless there is an equipment failure or other reason to shut down. A 10 second interval would be one common example. The damages from activities like this are terrible. Using explosives as a seismic sources was banned in the late 1970's I think due to harms done to marine mammals and organisms and the environment in general. Since then, airguns firing compressed air have been the dominant marine seismic source. Depending on the bandwidth of the bubble created and the volume of the airgun array they can also be extremely destructive to marine mammals like whales and porpoises so crews employ biologists as whale watchers in those areas where activity can be expected so that the effects on whales can be minimized. It is still a serious issue in offshore exploration though. Bomb fishing is something I would expect to hear about from some redneck coon-ass from Lousyana. I guess that people everywhere figured out how to stun fish to improve catch quantities and some use that as the primary method now. Maybe if deeper waters weren't fished out they could just go further offshore. Once you have foreign fleets dragging up everything in their paths then the only fish left are around the reefs.
- tescreal 2mo agoHow did we get to loonie tunes levels of absurdity? I understand dragnet fishing is destructive, but who first decided that dynamite was a good fishing method?
- ColdStream 2mo agoIt is easy thus people will do it. Convenience is the single most potent drug we have ever invented. Man kind - If we can, we will.
- mc3301 2mo agoOr avoiding starving.
- ColdStream 2mo agoTrue, in avoiding starving today, we take short cuts unaware they are bring more starving to tomorrow.
- izacus 2mo agoNoone who can buy dynamite and a boat is starving.
- alansaber 2mo ago...mankind invented convenience?
- manarth 2mo agoTechnically it is a good fishing method. It's quick, cheap, and effective. The damage that's done is mostly unseen by the people fishing.
- jbotz 2mo agoWe've done similar things probably since before we were even homo sapiens... or at least as long as we've had control of fire. Setting fire to large areas in order to drive a herd of mammoths of a cliff, for example. Convenient, and much safer than poking angry mammoths with sharpened sticks.
- Ned_Williams 2mo agoI can't believe this is still a thing.
- auszeph 2mo agoThere was a short doco on this in a recent Australian show if anyone is interested https://youtu.be/EXqPHM7Uauk?t=0&si=-W6-z4L8UEo4KtgS https://youtu.be/EXqPHM7Uauk?t=0&si=-W6-z4L8UEo4KtgS
- oatmeal1 2mo agoEcocide should be taken as seriously as homicide.
- aabdi 2mo agoI think its hard to understand for people why some people bomb fish. It's mostly profound poverty. The people want better for themselves, similar to people here. Since this is speaking about people in Sulawesi, they don't really have any money or work there. It's largely jungle, mining, farms. I'll just give an example with some of the people i spend time with whenever I'm in Indonesia. Eko lives in his village. He largely has no real job or work. He catches fish sometimes. Different ways. Sometimes with rod. Sometimes he shimmies an air tank with an air pipe underwater and spears them. He might get bends and die of the pains of it. I told him he shouldn't fish like that, but he still does it. You see, Eko does crazy things because wants his two kids to live better than him. He wants them to live more like those folks in Jakarta, with air conditioning and sanitary toilets. Eko thinks his life isn't great, but he makes do with it. He largely does not have a vehicle besides a weak scooter, he brings his kids together with. His hut is poor, and he built it himself with concrete and bamboo. No electrical. He defecates into a hole toilet he learned to build from his friend. Sometimes he defecates into the river. Eko's father died recently. The father likely died of poor treatment. The hospital is about 2 hours away in the main city. The hospital is poorly run. Its red lights make you feel ill; there is barely any materials or equipment. Sometimes he thinks he needs to bomb something to get more fish. It doesn't ever get him enough money because he needs a lot more than he does get from it. Even if his wife works on her tobacco farm, there is very little at the end of the month. Maybe his kids will die too in that same hospital. Some of my friend's kids died in similar fashion last year. Maybe an earthquake will happen again, and all the stuff that they've been doing will just be burnt away. Poverty. It's uh, quite bleak.
- JoshuaJB 2mo agoThe article argues that attributing it solely to poverty is a mistake, and that because of several cost barriers it's more likely being done by middle-income fishers.
- NeoByte 2mo ago[flagged]
- DarmokTanagra 2mo agoThis has been going on for a long long time, and its not going to stop until you address the poverty that leads people to people to make extreme choices in order to survive. The best way to stop bomb fishing is to give locals a reason to preserve the habitat, like what you see in places like Tulamben.
- bsian 2mo agoReminded me of that GTA 3 mission. I thought it was hilariously outlandish. Turns out people actually do it!
- 21asdffdsa12 2mo agoSame with Haiti- teach a man to fish, he eats every day, teach a gang-member to take all the fish and eat the allmende the country starves.
- throwaway2037 2mo agoHonest question: How many boats are actually doing this? It might just be one or two, but they are on the water 300+ days per year, and "bombing" for 12 hours a day. I think just one or two boats could do a huge amount of damage. Also, it seems pretty easy to fix this problem: Offer a reasonably large financial reward for information that leads to the arrest/conviction of captains of bomber boats. Probably the workers on those boats are paid very low wages. If you offer the equivalent of one year of earnings for the tip, you can probably catch the captains very quickly. Even better: Pass a law to take possession of the boat from these captains/owners. Then the workers can buy/rent the boat with the reward money and get back to work.
- shellfishgene 2mo agoUsually everyone in the fishing villages knows who does it. Often it's not the same people all the time: Individuals may need a larger amount of money than they can get from normal fishing, due to illness of a family member, or necessary repairs to a motorbike they rely on, etc. In a closely knit community you would not report your friend, especially knowing he did it out of desperation. As far as I know these are not usually larger boats with captains and workers, more single famlilies who own small craft.
- throwaway2037 2mo agoFirst, you have offered no evidence to support your claim. Second, the article debunks exactly this point with this paragraph: > While understudied, the incentives for the use of dangerous dynamite fishing are often falsely attributed solely to poverty and desperation. The cost barrier to buying boats, bombs, and detonators means it’s more likely a practice for middle-income fishers, according to experts.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]